Why going on tour with a sports team is the best thing you’ll ever do

The 56 hour round trip coach journey with an unusable toilet is totally worth it

Oh tour, how I miss you. Four nights in a low-budget hotel with some of the best people you will ever meet in your life and some of the worst food you’ll ever eat. Nothing about going on tour with your uni’s athletic union is boring and everything about it is bloody mental. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll vomit on a stranger. These are the best parts about it:

You bond with your whole team

So this is the obvious one. Before I went on tour I knew most of the girls but not many of the boys, but now I can tell you something I love about every single person on tour, and they love you back. I can’t imagine a way in which people would bond more because even though it is kind of forced, everybody embraces it and bloody loves it. The bonding starts on the coach when you all rise up against a mardy coach driver who for some reason isn’t up for letting you break the law and have alcohol on the coach (what a boring loser) and continues when you get to the hotel and instantly hate everybody wearing something that indicates that *gasp* they aren’t from your uni. The amount of times someone posts in the group chat after you get home ‘miss you all’ or ‘love you guys’ is beyond cute and you don’t even care about looking soppy.

When the social sec gets nostalgic

Everybody miraculously gets along

Okay, so not everyone all the time, but for the majority of the time everybody is in a state similar to those who experienced the summer of love (including the part where everyone seems to get off with each other). Yes some of the boys will drunkenly come to blows and there is a bit of drunk crying but nobody holds it against them because WE ARE FAMILY… I GOT ALL MY SPORTS TEAM WITH ME.

You now feel weird not dressing up in bizarre costumes

The pressure of working out what to wear is a thing of the past on tour. It’s like wearing school uniform again, everybody is equal. Not allowed to wear anything but your bed sheet? No problem. Have to be painted completely red? Pass the body paint. You feel distain for the teams who have cute themes like unicorns or disney princesses because you have gone hard core, dgaf how you look and feel a strange sense of pride about it.

Hangovers are non-existent

Coach is at 9am, you start drinking at 11am and you don’t stop until two days after you’ve got back from tour. Hair of the dog is not a myth. You get up every morning after three hours of sleep still drunk, slip a bit of vodka into your McDonald’s post-mix diet coke and head to the beach. You’re so tired by the time you stop drinking a couple of days after tour that you sleep right through the hangover.

EYEBROWS

If you didn’t lose half an eyebrow, did you even go on tour? Eyebrows is what is shouted if you make an outlandish claim that people know you can’t follow up. If you don’t follow through, you lose half an eyebrow. I lost mine by saying that I’d pay for everyone to stay another week.

I wasn’t loving my new look tbh

Bikini pics for DAYZ

Yes, I know it’s vain but when we go on holiday we all want nice pictures of us in our cozzies to upload to Facebook. When you’re surrounded by literally hundreds of other girls who want the exact same thing there is no need to feel self conscious and you can get tons of unashamedly posed for pictures at a pool party.

Tour hoodies

The best bit about the journey to wherever you are going on tour is the ceremonial handing out of the tour hoodies that have been carefully individualised to humiliate the wearer. I actually got off pretty lightly this year with ‘Feminists are just angry’ but there were some pretty horrendous ones that I’m probably not allowed to mention…